Hi! Welcome to Bottled Up, the podcast about a Nestlé bottling plant on Morongo Tribal Land. We are your hosts, Daria and Rafa.

In the early 2000s, the Morongo Nation signed a deal with Nestle Waters to lease land and water to the corporation for a by-the-gallon fee. Nestle bottled and sold Morongo water for national markets. This deal was made controversial for two reasons: first, because Nestle was bottling water in Southern California while the region was deep in drought; and second, because as a sovereign nation Morongo was not subject to the same public reporting requirements as American water districts.

This case brings up issues of governmental and water sovereignty, corporate greed, and the politics of environmental stewardship. We found that the Morongo Nation has been subject to a double standard of environmentalism: it is both under public scrutiny for making a deal with Nestle, and it is expected to uphold the stereotype of the "ecological Indian". Non-Morongo locals have used these expectations to argue that Morongo's sovereign right to independent governance should be subordinate to American state and local governance.

In Bottled Up, we talk about these issues in depth, along with Morongo history and the history of Nestle Waters. We also discuss the way this issue has been reported on: who's talking about it and what positions they represent.